GOING NATIVE - HOW TO OPTIMISE YOUR VIDEO'S REACH IN THE LAND OF SOCIAL MEDIA

You have your video content, you have uploaded it to your website because that is your showcase page, your online home. You upload to Youtube and Vimeo because it is good to have a wider catchment, more online presence. You can share your videos from the host sites to your social media platforms with a simple click, but should you?

Benefits of sharing video:

Backlinks - an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website, the more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be.

Video conveys a message more wholly than text or image alone.

Video is a more favoured media by platforms and viewers

Key influencers can like and/or share the video.

The more views, comments and conversations, the more it will be shared both manually and by the social media platform’s algorithm.

All sounds great doesn’t it? Yes you should absolutely have your content on Youtube, it is the world’s 2nd most popular website, 2nd only to its owners Google. Your customers and potential customers are likely to be a user.

When it comes to sharing your content however, think before you copy and paste your YouTube URL code into your next Facebook post or Tweet. Why? Facebook want you to stay on Facebook, Twitter want you to stay on Twitter. Facebook & Twitter are businesses and they want to keep all the traffic with them, not to Youtube, fair enough. They much prefer it if you natively upload your video content to their site, this means uploading the video file directly to your feed, the content will sit within your Videos section and can be viewed there or within your timeline.

Get More Shares, Likes, Comments

Because Facebook & Twitter prefer native content to 3rd party shares you may find some unusual behaviour when looking at your video’s reach and engagement. Whilst you may have thousands of followers, the native content is given more exposure than your YouTube shares, so just sharing a YouTube link will have a much smaller reach than if you natively upload.

So when posting to, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. if you want your video content to get up to 10x more shares, natively upload.

When Not to Go Native

Generally speaking, as a business you would probably want to give your content the best possible chance at being shown to the world, or your target viewers, and native uploads help maximise exposure, but why might you not want that exposure?

We at Bigtank specialise in creating video content for our clients, our clients are the ones who should benefit the most from their video content. Because we are both uploading the content to our respective YouTube channels our clients might find they are competing with us for the SEO benefits of their video.

As such we are careful at how we tag up our videos when uploading to YouTube, if the video is for a Legal Practice we would avoid using any tags or descriptive language that might steal viewers from their channel. Instead choosing tags that appeal to our target audience e.g. Video Marketing, Corporate Video, Client Testimonials etc.

That is why you will often see us sharing Facebook posts or YouTube links from our clients, it is not that we do not understand that ‘autoplay’ is better, that we are unwittingly losing potential reach, we simply want to drive as much traffic to our clients videos for our clients benefit and not for our own.

If you want more information about how to optimise your video for digital marketing get in touch.